Moby Dick: or, the White Whale eBook

They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s
disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round,
and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed
over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely
voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all.
It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts
of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic
vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones,
after what might be called the individual life had
departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the
sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took
poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried to shut
down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.

The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of
the very best steel; is about the bigness of a man’s
spread hand; and in general shape, corresponds to
the garden implement after which it is named; only
its sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably
narrower than the lower. This weapon is always
kept as sharp as possible; and when being used is
occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its
socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long,
is inserted for a handle.

“Queequeg no care what god made him shark,”
said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and
down; “wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but
de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.”

CHAPTER 67

Cutting In

It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed!
Ex officio professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen.
The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble;
every sailor a butcher. You would have thought
we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea
gods.

In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles,
among other ponderous things comprising a cluster
of blocks generally painted green, and which no single
man can possibly lift—­this vast bunch of
grapes was swayed up to the main-top and firmly lashed
to the lower mast-head, the strongest point anywhere
above a ship’s deck. The end of the hawser-like
rope winding through these intricacies, was then conducted
to the windlass, and the huge lower block of the tackles
was swung over the whale; to this block the great
blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was
attached. And now suspended in stages over the
side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with their
long spades, began cutting a hole in the body for
the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of
the two side-fins. This done, a broad, semicircular
line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted,
and the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus,
now commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass.
When instantly, the entire ship careens over on her
side; every bolt in her starts like the nailheads
of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers,
and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky.
More and more she leans over to the whale, while every